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Home , Biosphere, Biosphere 2, Bubble (physics), Ed Bass

Reprint from October 2010 © Discover Media LLC

www.B2science.com

from u•s airways magazine under the bubble

By Jordan Fisher Smith machines. It wasn’t until 18 years later, in 2009, that NASA announced total Photographs by Douglas Adesko on the International Station. At the end of their stay, the Biospherians emerged thinner, but by a number of measures healthier. 2 was one of the most lauded experiments of the 1990s, Despite these successes, the media and the science establishment then one of the most ridiculed. Now it is back, offering a unique way to seized upon the ways in which the project had failed. Chief among these put theories about and environment to the test. was an inability of ’s atmosphere to sustain human life. As was Biosphere 2 has stood amid the palo verde, mesquite, and ocotillo true outside, the problem was signaled by rising dioxide. By 1996 southwest of Oracle, , for less than 20 years, yet it looks decidedly Biosphere 2 had passed into the hands of , and later aged. Its skin is mostly and lacks window-washing tracks, so the the took over. Both used it to run scenarios of global hundreds of panes had to be cleaned by workers climate and atmospheric change. In its later life, instead hanging on ropes like rock climbers. At one seven people were employed to do this; today there are none. The deposits dust on the structure and the washes it downward, forming parallel streaks. The rain inside pushes against the glass. In 2003 there were about 150 employees on the site. Less than a third remain. Dry leaves collect against the air handlers by the main doorway: whiptail lizards skitter over the paths, and javelinas trot around the grounds at night. A note on a whiteboard in the operating engineers office tallies the number of poisonous reptiles encountered on the site, which is greater than the number of maintenance people left to encounter them: “Rattlesnakes: 17.” The café is closed, the mission control building de- serted, and inside the row of clear plastic sheds where were readied for installation in the main struc- ture, towering exotics — Panama hat palm, angel’s trumpet — stand bleached and lifeless where they perished when the water was turned off. A mono- chrome monitor displays the last numbers it ever knew, burned into its dead screen. On the shelf below is the 1986 manual for the environmental monitor- ing system to which it was connected. Nothing ages faster than the future. Constructed between 1987 and 1991. Biosphere 2 was a 3.14-acre sealed containing a min- iature rain forest, a desert, a little , a swamp, a , and a small farm. Its name gave homage to “Biosphere 1” — — and signaled the project’s audacious ambition: to copy our planet’s life systems in a prototype for a future colony on . A May 1987 article in discover called it “the most exciting scientific project to be undertaken in the U.S. since President Kennedy launched us toward the .” In 1991 a crew of eight sealed themselves inside. Over the next two years they grew 8o percent of their , something NASA has never attempted. They recycled their and effluent, drinking the same water countless , totally purified by their plants, , atmosphere, and

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www.B2science.com Life under the bubble continued of trying to model utopia, Biosphere 2 would actually model dystopia — oil fortune. Later that year Allen and his followers drove an old school bus a future plagued by high levels — wrote Rebecca Reider, to Berkeley, California, where they built an 82-foot sailboat. None of them author of a definitive history of the project. But while most research on had ever built even a rowboat. In 1975 they began sailing the Heraclitus impending environmental disaster relied on computer models, Biosphere 2 around the . They took her up the Amazon River, dove reefs in represented a fascinating alternative mode in which large-scale analog the tropics, and sailed her to to do research on . experiments employed real , soil, seawater, and air. With John Allen’s big dreams and ’s big money, the Synergians The man behind Biosphere 2, was John Allen, a Colorado School of began taking on bigger things. They acquired a huge cattle ranch in Mines-trained metallurgist and Harvard MBA. In 1963, after two halluci- Australia, started a sustainable forest in , built a hotel and nogenic experiences on peyote. Allen looked out of the Manhattan office cultural center in Kathmandu, and took on other projects in Nepal, the building in which he was working and realized he could not open the United Kingdom, France, and the . Now calling themselves window. He felt trapped like a bug inside glass — an ironic epiphany for a the Institute for Ecotechnics, they began hosting international meetings man who would work so hard to seal up a handful of his followers three on , , and then . At a decades hence. So he sailed from New York aboard a freighter and traveled conference in Oracle in 1984, Allen announced his plan to build a prototype the world, seeking wisdom. By 1967 he had become a self-styled esoteric Mars colony on Earth before the decade was out. The destiny of human teacher in Haight-Ashbury-era San Francisco, delivering weekly lectures to beings was to seed Earth’s life into space, and first stop would be a working a group of mostly younger followers and cohabitants. In 1968 he and his colony on Mars. students went to New York to set up a theater company, and from there The principals of the institute broke ground for Biosphere 2 in January to , where they started a commune near Santa Fe. If most 1987. If some of them lacked academic qualifications for the jobs they held, such counterculture experiments yielded to entropy and poverty, Allen’s they enlisted real experts to execute the design. Walter Adey, a geologist at Synergia Ranch is a notable exception. The Synergians were a very hard- the Smithsonian Institution, was in charge of the ocean. The rain forest was working bunch. the domain of Sir Ghillean Prance, then director of the New York Botanical In 1974 a lanky young Texan and Yale dropout named Ed Bass wandered Garden. These and other experts installed 3,800 species of life inside, even up the driveway to Synergia Ranch. Like Allen, Bass had a strong interest in as cranes lifted great sections of white the environment. Unlike Allen, he was the billionaire heir to an

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www.B2science.com Life under the bubble continued superstructure into place overhead. The majesty and complexity of the proj- and releasing , but they also do the reverse. Plants, too, respire (or ect entranced the press, touching on myth and religious narrative. Rebecca breathe), burning carbohydrates to do work like making branches and roots. Reider wrote. Time called it “Noah’s Ark: The Sequel.” This created expecta- In the soil around their roots, billions of fungi and soil respire as tions that would be hard to meet. well. In fact, the greater part of all “breathing” in terrestrial systems goes on In September 1991, four women and four men in NASA-style jumpsuits underground. entered the air lock of Biosphere 2. Twelve days into the mission, Jane Ever grand in their ambitions, Allen and his people intended Biosphere 2 Poynter, a young Englishwoman in charge of the farm, put her hand in a to be used by rotating crews for 100 years. Feeling they had one shot to threshing machine while winnow- invest their world with life-giving nutrients, they had loaded their ing rice. The group’s doctor sewed with compost and rich muck from the bottom of a cattle pond. (Agricultural the tip of her middle finger back chemicals used inside might end up in their air and water.) When the air on, but the graft didn’t take and locks closed, soil bacteria had a massive party, exhaling carbon dioxide and she was evacuated for surgery. She tipping the balance the wrong way. returned in only a few hours to As oxygen was converted to carbon dioxide, free oxygen in the atmo- serve out the two-year mission, but sphere declined. By January 1993, Biosphere 2’s carbon dioxide levels were when she reentered the air lock, a 12 times that of the outside, and oxygen levels were what mountaineers duffel bag was placed inside with get at 17,000 feet. The crew’s doctor was having trouble adding up simple her. It contained nothing of sub- figures and disqualified himself from duty. So, a year and four months into stance, Poynter said — some circuit the mission, tank trucks containing 31,000 pounds of oxygen started boards and a planting plan for the driving up the access road to the site. rain forest — but the media had a The story of fresh-faced idealists getting taken down a notch played The eight original Biospherians on the day with it, along with the fact well in the media. For two years the glass walls of Biosphere 2 were lined first day of their two-year mission: September 26 , 1991. that someone had left and then with TV cameras and tourists. The crew’s turned into reality TV. In fact, reentered, which couldn’t have been the producers of the world’s first reality TV show,Big Brother, which aired done on Mars. in the Netherlands in 1999, acknowledged Biosphere 2 as their inspira- More ominous, signs of trouble with the internal atmosphere began tion. True to reality TV’s typical plotline, months cooped up together while within 24 hours. Each morning the crew had a breakfast meeting over struggling with their atmosphere and hunger and being filmed by well-fed bowls of homegrown porridge in Star Trek-style chairs around a polished people led to squabbles among the Biospherians. They emerged from the black granite table. The morning after closure, the crew captain announced air lock in September 1993 in two groups of four who weren’t speaking. that carbon dioxide in Biosphere 2’s atmosphere had risen to 521 parts Organizational cracks opened between them and their advisory scientists per million, a 45 percent increase above levels outside at the time. By the and extended into their relationship with Ed Bass. Originally budgeted at following day, the lowest it went was 826. Over the months that followed, $30 million. Biosphere 2 had already cost a reported $200 million. By the the news at the morning meetings got worse. Crew members were feeling time a second crew took its place inside, Bass had had enough. On April 1, tired and began to pant when they climbed stairs. 1994, his bankers, accompanied by carloads of armed federal marshals and In May 1992 in Palisades, New York, geochemist Wally Broecker got a sheriff’s deputies, swept into the site with a restraining order. The second phone call from someone at Biosphere 2, asking if he would be willing to consult on their atmosphere. Since the late 1970s. when he became the Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Broecker had been - ing the alarm about a buildup of carbon dioxide in the big atmosphere. An elfish presence with a dried-apple-doll face and wild, tousled hair, he was already one of the great men of atmospheric-change research when he crossed the George Washington Bridge for dinner with John Allen at a Manhattan restaurant. The meeting had a cloak-and-dagger feel. Allen, a handsome, clean-shaven, broad-shouldered man who often wore a fedora, reminded Broecker of Indiana Jones. By Broecker’s account, Allen proffered a graph of the composition of Biosphere 2’s atmosphere, then nervously pulled it back, as if someone else might see it. A week later Broecker flew to Arizona and began collecting data. Much attention had been focused on charismatic species when Biosphere 2 was put together. A biologist surveyed the world’s humming- birds to find one with a bill the right shape to pollinate a variety of plants inside the structure, and without a mating display predisposing it to fatal collisions with the glass. But Broecker and his graduate student Jeffrey Sev- eringhaus discovered that the culprits in the carbon dioxide problem were the tiniest organisms on board: soil bacteria. The process of their subversion was , in which living things release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Green plants absorb sun- Biosphere 2’s 91-foot -tall rain forest contains more than 150 species and light and carbon dioxide during , making carbohydrates now provides scientists a test ground for experiments.

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www.B2science.com Life under the bubble continued crew lingered inside Biosphere 2 for another five months and 16 days before around the cycle faster,” Berry says. There was no net benefit. Today soil terminating its mission. respiration remains the wild card it was for the Biospherians. Known to Biosphere 2, it was widely reported, was a catastrophe. In 1999, when increase with warmer temperatures, it could cut the Time did its fin de siècle summary of the 20th century, it included Bio- from tree-planting projects to zero as soils belch out more CO2 than what sphere 2 in its list of the worst 100 ideas. is stored in tree trunks and the like. With the Biospherians ejected from their Eden, Bass’s people began Meanwhile, in 1996, Broecker invited Chris Langdon, a young marine looking for a new entity to operate the facility. Eventually they struck a deal ecologist at Columbia, to have a look at what could be done with the ocean. with Columbia University. The new director of research was Wally Broecker. Langdon may have been the only person on his flight to Arizona with dive who had coined the term “global warming” two decades earlier. Here was a gear. He hadn’t been spending much time in ; his research more gigantic laboratory flask with a whole tropical forest and an ocean inside it typically had him on oceangoing research vessels. He showed up for work — models of what many scientists suspected were the two biggest carbon in sun-faded T-shirts, looking more like an extra for a Jimmy Buffett music sinks in the world. By 1995, when the deal was closed, Broecker was not video than a professor. alone in his sense of urgency. The first thing Langdon set out to do was balance the That January, Rodolfo del Valle, chief of Antarctic earth sciences at the of Biosphere’s ocean. It had gone acid, absorbing carbon dioxide from Argentine Antarctic Institute, received a distress call from colleagues at a Biosphere 2’s atmosphere and forming carbonic acid as a result. This was research station adjoining the Larsen A shelf. The men were yelling, and happening on the outside, too, although it was a phenomenon biologists in the background Del Valle could hear a roar. The Larsen A, a sheet of the had largely ignored until then. “Of the carbon dioxide human beings put size of Rhode Island and 500 feet thick, was collapsing into the Weddell Sea. into the atmosphere from the burning of fuels and deforestation,” The next day Del Valle called for an aircraft and flew over the area. All that Berry says, “roughly a third remains in the atmosphere, a third goes into was left of the massive ice shelf were small as far as the eye could terrestrial , and a third goes into the ocean.” As a result, Langdon see. “I cried because I could see the future: he said. That December, the In- says, the world’s have fallen one point in pH since the Industrial tergovernmental Panel on reported that greenhouse Revolution. That doesn’t sound like much, but pH is logarithmic. Today’s were rising, with human activity the likely cause and dangerous changes in oceans are 30 percent more acid than they were a century ago. the earth’s conditions a likely result. Langdon worried about the effect on shellfish and coral. When seawater Joe Berry, a plant physiologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, gets more acid, he explains, it holds fewer free carbonate ions. and came to work with Broecker at Biosphere 2 in 1996. Berry, Guanghui Lin, marine organisms that build shells rely on free carbonate for raw material. Kevin Griffin, Bruno Manru, Barry Osmond, and others began afflicting the Biosphere 2 was the perfect lab; here was a little ocean in which, unlike the little world with simulated droughts and a high-CO2 atmosphere and mea- real one, acidity could be adjusted. By manipulating the acidity of the Bio- suring what happened in its rain forest and farm, now planted with rows of sphere 2 ocean and measuring the resulting growth rates in coral between cottonwood and poplar trees to simulate a commercial operation 1996 and 2003, Langdon proved that from rising atmo- — a natural carbon sink. spheric carbon dioxide would radically affect -shelled As evidence of global warming increased, removing carbon from the air . He forecast that by 2065, rates of growth in coral reefs would had become important in the world outside. Success hinged, in part, on un- decline by 40 percent. derstanding the loop between photosynthesis and respiration on In experimental modeling of life systems and , scale and a global scale. As it stands, photosynthesis, which takes in carbon dioxide, complexity are important. In what are called microcosm experiments, plant only slightly outstrips respiration, which releases it again. The difference be- physiologists study leaves in sealed containers so their gas exchange can tween intake and output — just 1 to 2 percent of the total carbon going into ecosystems — accounts for the amount of carbon fixed in things like the trunks of Biosphere 2’s cottonwoods. What would happen to this relationship, Berry and his colleagues wondered, as the world grew warmer and more carbon dioxide was released? Photosyn- thesis was limited by the amount of carbon that green plants could scavenge out of the air. But with more carbon dioxide present, would photosynthesis speed up, saving us all by fixing more carbon? What the scientists found inside Biosphere 2 was that when CO2 was elevated, plants photosynthesized more, but their leaves and roots and the soil bacteria respired more as well. “Carbon just chased itself Isabel Stubblefield was a cook during the first two-year mission at Biosphere 2. She still works there.

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www.B2science.com Life under the bubble continued be tracked, but that gives information only on the leaf’s relationship to manufacturers of scales that the atmosphere, not that of the whole plant, its soil, and other plants and weigh jetliners.) . As the scale gets bigger, enclosed experiments are referred to as DeLong is trying to learn mesocosms. There has never been an experimental mesocosm as big as how to create realistic rain from Biosphere 2. a series of pipes and overhead However promising the facility was during the Columbia period, grant sprinklers. That makes sense, applications and submissions for publication from Biosphere 2 were since the university’s new undermined by the project’s bad press. Like dog feces on a shoe, the project research focus for Biosphere 2 is seemed to carry a whiff of something the big grantors did not want in their water: not just rain but runoff portfolios. Although it did get some small education grants from the Na- absorption by soil, use by plants, tional Science Foundation, major government research agencies generally and evaporation. The scales wouldn’t touch the place. “It was extremely unfair,” Broecker says. In 2003 under DeLong’s tables will record the situation led new Columbia University president Lee Bollinger to jetti- real-time changes in water son the project. Staff were given pink slips, and filters were turned off in the saturation while sensors in the ocean. Langdon’s corals didn’t survive. For a while it looked as if Biosphere 2 air and the soil record humidity, would become a theme park at the center of a housing development. After chemistry, and gas exchange. Ar- The “south lung” is one of the two Columbia walked out of its lease, Ed Bass sold Biosphere 2 to the developer, izona no longer runs Biosphere 2 rooms that allowed Biosphere 2 to and the University of Arizona in Tucson took over under a new lease. as a sealed facility. It now uses a breathe–and not explode–during its Today Biosphere 2 is still open to visitors, a strange mixture of botanical “flow through” system, in which former life as a closed structure. garden, aquarium, and house museum about the lives of the early-1990s air exchange with the outside is Biospherians with slightly big hair and loose-fitting clothes. Roy Walford, allowed while sensors record the movement of moisture and gas, enabling the first mission’s doctor, described the place as “the Garden of Eden on accurate estimates of total mass exchange with the outside world. The rea- top of an aircraft carrier” in Reider’s book. Belowdecks are concrete galleries son for the change is the cost of . Biosphere 2 is a greenhouse in the full of wind from rumbling air handlers, tanks, pumps, and miles of cable desert, and Columbia was paying as much as $1.5 million a year to cool it. and pipe. But aircraft carriers have sailors with scrapers and paintbrushes. According to the University of Arizona, energy costs under the new system Biosphere 2 does not. Rust is becoming a problem. are less than a third of that. Down below there is also a cavelike aquarium with viewing windows Back in the 1990s, critics pointed to Biosphere 2 as an example of private into the Biosphere 2 ocean. Despite its murky appearance (“The last time philanthropy pushing science in wacky directions. But scientists who have we could see the opposite wall was 2004; my guide tells me), the ocean worked in this product of Ed Bass’s generosity see it another way. Wally is not dead. Bright tropical fish appear out of the emerald gloom and flit Broecker, Joe Berry, and Chris Langdon, along with Columbia’s last director along the glass: yellow tangs, sergeant majors, doctorfish. No one has been of research, Barry Osmond, and the University of Arizona’s present one, feeding them, says Matt Sullivan, the University of Arizona molecular and Travis Huxman, continue to believe in the potential of mesocosm research. evolutionary biologist who now presides over the underwater portion of In July 2010, Langdon was in Australia as an adviser on the Australian Tropi- Biosphere 2. cal Ocean Simulator, currently in the works. The Simulator will allow marine Remarkably, after nearly two decades of separation from the Pacific, biologists to put ocean life through conditions they hope they won’t see Biosphere 2’s seawater still looks like living seawater under the microscope. outside, just as Langdon did at Biosphere 2. The University of Arizona, “The chemistry and the microbes suggest that it’s just another coastal meanwhile, has linked research at Biosphere 2 with projects that operate ocean,” Sullivan says. “I was shocked.” His specialty is microbial life in in the outside world. For example, Sullivan’s use of the facility was ancillary oceans, and his particular interest is the way that drive the evolu- to the principal focus of his grant, which involves mapping ocean viruses tion and regulate the activities of bacteria. If this seems like an obscure around the world. His NSF grant might signal an end to Biosphere 2’s big subject, it is of far more import to our future than it . “Ocean micro- chill in academia. The university has put out 30 proposals in the last two bial photosynthesis accounts for half the photosynthesis in the world,” Sul- years and believes some are recommended for funding. livan notes. In May he landed a $600,000 grant from the National Science Now 81, John Allen still lives on Synergia Ranch in New Mexico with sev- Foundation to study the role of viruses in an oxygen-starved region of the eral of Biosphere 2’s builders and at least one of its first crew, who fiercely real ocean. Sullivan has been using the Biosphere 2 ocean to develop newer, defend their original vision for it. Their research yacht, Heraclitus, still plies more accurate sampling methods for this task. the world’s oceans. Jane Poynter, who lost the tip of her finger in a rice From Sullivan’s opaque tropical ocean, which still has a white-sand thresher, married a fellow crew member. They started a Tucson aerospace beach and palm trees at one end, I follow a path across the savanna and firm, a contractor on NASA’s new Orion space capsule. Wally Broecker still through the living quarters to what was once the farm. All its crops and goes to his office across the Hudson from Manhattan. After all Ed Bass gave earth are gone. Stripped to bare concrete, it resembles a glass-roofed away, in 2009 he was tied at number 236 in Fortune’s list of the 400 richest aircraft hangar. It is now the domain of a red-haired University of Arizona Americans. He continues to fund research at Biosphere 2. And Matt Sullivan, geologist named Steve DeLong, who is working on a huge new mesocosm: the ocean microbe researcher, plans to run the lab while others collect three towering, sloping steel tables nearly 100 feet long and 60 wide, viruses at sea for him. He suffers from terrible seasickness and thinks an upon which will be constructed artificial with underlying soil ocean in Arizona is just fine. and plants. Embedded in the supports will be the world’s most accurate giant bathroom scale, capable of supporting 2 million pounds and sensing Jordan Fisher Smith, author of the book Future Noir, was a park ranger for 21 changes of less than half a percent. (At the time of my visit last spring, the years before turning to writing. His work has appeared in Backpacker technology didn’t exist yet, and DeLong was working to develop it with and Men’s Journal.

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